High-Stakes Testing: A Lesson in Texting While Driving

Here’s a cool, funny, and genuinely effective public service announcement out of Belgium. According to Gizmodo, non-profit Responsible Young Drivers essentially pranked a bunch of people taking their drivers license exam. To pass, they were told, they’d have to show they could adequately send text messages while keeping control of the car.

The results, all caught on camera, strike an impressive balance. You’ll laugh at the skids, swerves and shrieks of the panicked test takers even while realizing that the flying cones could, outside the context of a YouTube clip, be someone’s child.

The power of the clip comes in part from how easy it is to identify with the drivers, who quickly understand that performing both tasks well is nearly impossible. “Honestly, I feel like an idiot who can’t drive,” says one, while another realizes: “People will die.”

The Working Families Party says it supports the City Council bill to exempt MTA bus drivers from the Right of Way Law, but its position is based on a misreading of the law and the premise that bus drivers, in the course of doing their jobs, should be allowed to strike people who have the right of way. […]

In an apparent quest to see which local daily can issue the most ridiculously auto-centric assessment of the problems plaguing the public realm, the "New York" Post has some competition. In August, 8-year-old Axel Pablo was killed by a cab driver in Harlem. Witnesses say the cabbie was on his cell phone. Though police cleared […]

Police filed no charges against the MTA bus driver who killed a pedestrian in Bedford-Stuyvesant two weeks ago. Instead, NYPD and the tabloids put the victim on trial. At around 1:30 in the afternoon on Wednesday, September 17, Jennifer White-Estick was run over while trying to retrieve her cell phone from underneath a B44 bus […]